Summary
cnix—short for Corbet Nix—is a knowledge compiler for a suite of Nix projects. It keeps durable technical memory, explains the projects to potential users, audits documentation against implementation evidence, and safely emits a public website from an Obsidian-readable Markdown corpus.
Why it exists
The suite contains enough applications and modules that discovery becomes a problem even for its authors. cnix makes the index as valuable as the articles: it should answer what exists, why it matters, how mature it is, and where to look next before a reader opens a detailed page.
The same work serves five purposes:
- Preserve working knowledge for humans and agents.
- Explore a contemporary, LLM-led form of enterprise architecture.
- Present reusable mechanisms so others can request or contribute packaging.
- Reveal cruft, stale claims, edge cases, and implementation defects.
- Demonstrate the method itself as a public, inspectable product.
Product boundary
cnix owns authored explanations, public tutorials, provenance, verification, publication policy, and a read-only view of related work. It does not own the declared architecture or become a ticket database.
- Nix repositories remain authoritative for implementation and public options.
- A private parent workspace remains authoritative for real configuration and private tasks.
- GitHub issues and pull requests remain authoritative for public contribution work.
- A future nixea product may derive architecture directly from Nix source. cnix and nixea will share stable project identifiers and links, not copied facts or build dependencies.
What success looks like
A person can understand a project from one concise technical page, then meet it
through a distinct showcase designed for discovery and adoption. Both are
compiled from one reviewed project concept. An agent can discover the same
corpus through indexes, structured frontmatter, standard links, raw Markdown,
JSON, RSS, a sitemap, and llms.txt. A failed or uncertain safety check
publishes nothing and leaves the last-known-good site online.